Teaching in the Middle Grades Today: Examining Teachers’ Beliefs About Middle Grades Teaching

Since the beginning of the middle school movement in the mid-1960s, middle level advocates have called for a school experience for young adolescents grounded in adolescent development that engages students in meaningful learning (Eichhorn, 1966; Alexander & Williams, 1965). The aim of this exploratory multi-case study was to understand middle level teachers’ beliefs about middle level instruction in the current educational environment. To gain this understanding, researchers asked ten current middle grades teachers with varying levels of experience to discuss their beliefs regarding their primary purpose as a middle grades teacher, the current status of middle level teaching, their best and worst instructional lessons, and their perceived barriers to teaching at the middle level. The teachers described the role of teaching in the middle grades as challenging and stressful, but of great importance. In general, they described instruction that included discovery, student engagement, and relevance in an effort to address students’ academic development. There was minimal mention of the non-academic aspects of adolescent development. Finally, teachers viewed curriculum restrictions, students’ attitudes toward learning, difficulty with differentiation, and lack of technology as significant barriers to their success in the classroom

The Status of Middle Schools in the Southeastern United States: Perceptions and Implementation of the Middle School Model

For more than 100 years, education communities have debated how best to educate the young adolescent. Proponents of both the junior high school model and the current middle school model have advocated for a specialized approach to educating adolescents that emphasizes the developmental needs of students. To accomplish this, various organizational structures and instructional approaches are recommended. This survey study examines the perceptions of these middle school practices and the implementation of those practices in middle schools in the Southeastern region of the United States. We note several key trends in our results and highlight key differences in perception of importance and implementation of middle school components and strategies compared to the most recent large scale survey administered by McEwin and Greene (2011)

Foreground Detection in Camouflaged Scenes

Foreground detection has been widely studied for decades due to its importance in many practical applications. Most of the existing methods assume foreground and background show visually distinct characteristics and thus the foreground can be detected once a good background model is obtained. However, there are many situations where this is not the case. Of particular interest in video surveillance is the camouflage case. For example, an active attacker camouflages by intentionally wearing clothes that are visually similar to the background. In such cases, even given a decent background model, it is not trivial to detect foreground objects. This paper proposes a texture guided weighted voting (TGWV) method which can efficiently detect foreground objects in camouflaged scenes. The proposed method employs the stationary wavelet transform to decompose the image into frequency bands. We show that the small and hardly noticeable differences between foreground and background in the image domain can be effectively captured in certain wavelet frequency bands. To make the final foreground decision, a weighted voting scheme is developed based on intensity and texture of all the wavelet bands with weights carefully designed. Experimental results demonstrate that the proposed method achieves superior performance compared to the current state-of-the-art results.Comment: IEEE International Conference on Image Processing, 201

Feasibility Study of Mohawk Industries Water Bottle Recycling Program with Automated Compactor/Baler

Mohawk Industries requested a senior design project for a feasibility study of a compactor/baler program. The compactor/baler program has the potential to reduce Mohawk Industries’ polyethylene terephthalate (PET) recycling center costs, thereby increasing the company’s profits. Mohawk Industries uses PET from recycled plastic bottles as a raw material to extrude carpet yarn fibers. Currently, Mohawk Industries has two methods to obtain the PET required to extrude the carpet yarn fibers: purchase recycled bottles from landfills/recycling centers and extrude into PET pellets, or purchase PET pellets from an outside source at a much higher cost. The compactor/baler program would introduce a third option for Mohawk Industries to obtain polyethylene. This program would source the recycled bottles directly from consumers at major sporting facilities such as LakePoint Sports Community located in Cartersville, GA. Compactor/baler recycling bins would be placed throughout the major sporting facility. These compactor/balers would compact recycled plastic bottles into bales containing the polyethylene that Mohawk Industries uses to extrude carpet yarn fibers. These bales of recycled plastic bottles would be transported to Mohawk Industries Recycling Center located in Summerville, GA. Mohawk Industries’ recycling center would sort, filter, wash, and extrude the recycled plastic into PET pellets that can be extruded into carpet yarn fibers. This senior design project was an evaluation of the feasibility of a compactor/baler program at LakePoint Sports Community. Technical and non-technical requirements for the compactor/baler program were determined including safety and aesthetic aspects of the compactor, size and binding materials used for the bales, and compacting and weight requirements for the ejected bales. Material handling requirements for the compactor/baler programs were identified as collection, storage, and transportation conditions. Current state processes were directly compared to a future state process implementing the compactor/baler program. The process flow models of the compactor/baler program show a streamline and simplified system for collecting, recycling, and transporting plastic bottles containing PET. Logistical analysis proved Mohawk’s tractor-trailers could transport the compacted bales at the lowest possible cost from LakePoint Sports Community in Cartersville, GA to Mohawk Industries Recycling Center in Summerville, GA. However, the cost justification showed LakePoint Sports Community’s insufficient amount of PET bottles sold. Therefore, the senior design team deemed it not feasible to implement the compactor/baler program at LakePoint Sports Community, based on the facility’s current size. LakePoint could be reevaluated in the future, after a significant expected growth over the next 5 years. A lot was learned from the process, such as the calculations for shipping costs. The senior design team had difficulty finding material on this topic and required a significant amount of time in order to find the correct information. The team also learned how painstaking it can be to obtain information from management. There were long wait times for crucial information. Kennesaw State University’s senior industrial and systems engineering students took on Mohawk Industries’ request for a feasibility study of implementing a compactor/baler program eager to become the next generation of engineers

A Fusion Framework for Camouflaged Moving Foreground Detection in the Wavelet Domain

Detecting camouflaged moving foreground objects has been known to be difficult due to the similarity between the foreground objects and the background. Conventional methods cannot distinguish the foreground from background due to the small differences between them and thus suffer from under-detection of the camouflaged foreground objects. In this paper, we present a fusion framework to address this problem in the wavelet domain. We first show that the small differences in the image domain can be highlighted in certain wavelet bands. Then the likelihood of each wavelet coefficient being foreground is estimated by formulating foreground and background models for each wavelet band. The proposed framework effectively aggregates the likelihoods from different wavelet bands based on the characteristics of the wavelet transform. Experimental results demonstrated that the proposed method significantly outperformed existing methods in detecting camouflaged foreground objects. Specifically, the average F-measure for the proposed algorithm was 0.87, compared to 0.71 to 0.8 for the other state-of-the-art methods.Comment: 13 pages, accepted by IEEE TI

Patterns of successful CRM:More about solutions than software

Customer Relationship Management (CRM), much hyped during the dot com years, has always been more than software. The CRM industry was tainted by high profile missteps, partly due to its focus on software, rather than solutions (Patton, 2001). However, managers must understand that CRM is a solution, not software that integrates both technology and operational improvements. With the ability to coordinate across all customer contact points, decision makers must recognize that CRM is an organizational process that integrates information from previously disparate channels (sales, marketing, customer service via phone, text chat, or web) to better serve customers (Day and Van der Bulte, 2002). This paper examines the fundamentals of CRM, its goals and common pitfalls, and its prerequisite for this long-term, successful implementation with the goal of extracting patterns of successful CRM deployments

Rural America: Philanthropy's Misunderstood Opportunity for Impact

Often overlooked by national funders, rural America faces profound inequities, but also provides an untapped source of innovation. FSG received funding from the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation to produce this paper, which provides an introduction to the current state and root causes of the challenges facing rural communities, the missed opportunity for impact, and implications for philanthropy. The paper also highlights organizations working on rural issues and opportunities for funders to get involved

The association of metacognitive beliefs with emotional distress after diagnosis of cancer.

Objective: Emotional distress after a diagnosis of cancer is normal and, for most people, will diminish over time. However, a significant minority of patients with cancer experience persistent or recurrent symptoms of emotional distress for which they need help. A model developed in mental health, the self-regulatory executive function model (S-REF), specifies that maladaptive metacognitive beliefs and processes, including persistent worry, are key to understanding why such emotional problems persist. This cross-sectional study explored, for the first, time whether metacognitive beliefs were associated with emotional distress in a cancer population, and whether this relationship was mediated by worry, as predicted by the S-REF model. Method: Two hundred twenty-nine participants within 3 months of diagnosis of, and before treatment for, primary breast or prostate cancer completed self-report questionnaires measuring anxiety, depression, posttraumatic stress disorder (PTSD) symptoms, metacognitive beliefs, worry, and illness perceptions. Results: Regression analysis showed that metacognitive beliefs were associated with symptoms of anxiety, depression, and PTSD, and explained additional variance in these outcomes after controlling for age, gender, and illness perceptions. Structural equation modeling was consistent with cross-sectional hypotheses derived from the theory that metacognitive beliefs cause and maintain distress both directly and indirectly by driving worry. Conclusions: The findings provide promising first evidence that the S-REF model may be usefully applied in cancer. Further study is required to establish the predictive and clinical utility of these findings

Is there any Evidence for Regional Atmospheric 14C Offsets in the Southern Hemisphere?

Center for Accelerator Mass Spectrometry (CAMS) Tasmanian huon pine (Lagarostrobos franklinii) decadal measurements for the interval AD 745–855 suggest a mean interhemispheric radiocarbon offset (20 ± 5 yr), which is considerably lower than the previously reported mean interhemispheric offset for the last 2 millennia (44 ± 17 yr). However, comparable University of Waikato (Wk) New Zealand kauri (Agathis australis) measurements show significantly higher values (56 ± 6 yr), suggesting the possibility of a temporary geographic (intrahemispheric) offset between Tasmania, Australia, and Northland, New Zealand, during at least 1 common time interval. Here, we report 9 new Wk Tasmanian huon pine measurements from the decades showing the largest huon/kauri difference. We show statistically indistinguishable Wk huon and Wk kauri 14C ages, thus dispelling the suggestion of a 14C geographic offset between Tasmania and Northland